Bookworm, no. 47
Sara Krahn reviews David Roche’s memoir. Traditional knowledge for little ones. Original poetry by Kevin Irie. The Griffin Poetry Prize winner. Inside the June issue.
Seventh Heaven
Standing at the Back Door of Happiness: And How I Unlocked It
David Roche
Harbour Publishing
192 pages, softcover
The cover of Standing at the Back Door of Happiness features a startling photo of the author David Roche, the left side of his face mottled by an overgrowth of veins. The octogenarian has lived with the vascular malformation his entire life. “Despite what most people are inclined to think when they first meet me, my facial difference has been an incredible gift,” Roche writes in his memoir. “I can see the beauty of other people, as flawed as we all are.” Throughout his wickedly droll yet heart-rending book, he considers beauty with little compunction, often to describe what many would consider the most grotesque aspects of life.
Roche shares stories of his “seriously Catholic childhood” in Gary, Indiana, his time as a “Marxist-Leninist cadre” supporting the Democratic Workers Party in San Francisco during the 1970s and ’80s, and, later, his thirty-plus years as a storytelling coach. With shrewdness and intimacy, he transforms dark experiences into moments of levity. Once, Roche spent his entire Christmas holiday in an ICU, where he received sclerotherapy to treat his face. In a letter to friends and family, he mused, “The notion of having alcohol injected directly into one’s head is, to me, inherently funny.”
The theme of mortality runs throughout. Overwhelmed while caring for his dying friend in a musty room, Roche prepared a snack for a distraction. “Eat the fucking Jell-O,” he thought, “pass the time away until you die. You are supposed to die. Somebody said so. That’s the rule.” But the artificial food “smelled worse than death,” and he realized the scent of sickness was “more real.” He relaxed and saw that the man “rotted and glowed” into death. In this scene and many others, Roche’s prose smacks readers in the face: “The process of dying is profoundly revelatory of beauty.” He presents a compelling case. Death is everywhere and not to be feared. It may just be the secret to life itself.
—Sara Krahn
Where the Wild Things Are
Sometimes I Feel Like an Oak
Danielle Daniel and Jackie Traverse
Groundwood Books
32 pages, hardcover and ebook
A Flock of Gulls, a Chorus of Frogs
Roy Henry Vickers and Lucky Budd
Harbour Publishing
24 pages, board book
“Like my Algonquin ancestors,” Danielle Daniel writes in the author’s note of her latest children’s book, “I believe that trees are sentient beings with spirits who can feel things.” This much is evident in the aesthetic and therapeutic Sometimes I Feel Like an Oak, the third title in a series that encourages emotional intelligence.
Daniel pairs twelve poems with twelve different trees. Painted by Jackie Traverse, each spread features a subdued landscape—sometimes of a forest, often with an expressive child underneath strong branches and always beautifully rendered. Whether a redwood, cedar, or aspen, each tree has innate qualities that mark distinct sensations. “If we take the time to visit with them, look thoughtfully, listen carefully and reflect often,” we will come to understand that they are emblematic of unity, wisdom, and compassion. Consider this iconic deciduous species:
Sometimes I feel like a maple,
full and most generous.
I share my flowing sap
as winter turns toward spring.
The poems also invite reflection on more unhappy emotions:
Sometimes I feel like a willow,
shivery, sensitive and sad.
I swing and sway in the howling wind,
drooping my long supple branches.
Daniel hopes “we will greet every tree we meet as we would a person—worthy of kindness, respect, protection and love.” It’s a fruitful message, aptly packaged for an impressionable crowd.
Meanwhile, with A Flock of Gulls, a Chorus of Frogs, Roy Henry Vickers and Lucky Budd have written and designed a colourful, compact, and informative board book with textured illustrations from their Northwest coastal cultures. It teaches young children the terms for groups of various critters and creatures: a jumble of jellyfish, for instance, is called a “bloom,” sea otters a “raft,” and eagles an “aerie.” Short and sweet, this text complements Daniel’s, in that even the attentive grown-up might learn a thing or two.
—David Venn
Poet’s Corner
RCMP File #10349 (Sonnet for a Grandmother)
The birthdate typed on your Internment File
differs from the date we had cut
in your death stone. After a while
we gave up guessing. You never denied, but
the year was uncertain. Picture bride
sailing from Japan. Hiroshima. A minor, teen?
Traced back to Vancouver, we tried
to place you. Now government records have been
opened like salmon. You’re in there
like fish bones stuck in a throat.
Case numbers twist into hooks, barbs, bare
fishing lines where enemy aliens float,
a catch wrapped in paper. Popoff: your stated
(after uprooting) address. Your capture stamped and dated.
—Kevin Irie is the author of, most recently, The Tantramar Re-Vision. Find more of his work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Awards Season: The Griffin Poetry Prize
Congratulations to the translator George McWhirter (Canada/Northern Ireland) and the poet Homero Aridjis (Mexico), who took home the international Griffin Poetry Prize last Wednesday.
The judges wrote of the winning collection, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, “The book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding.”
Inside the June Issue
Joyce Wayne reads Nora Gold’s In Sickness and in Health; Yom Kippur in a Gym.
“Little did I know then that further wonders awaited.” Robert Lewis looks back on reporting for Time magazine.
David Wilson reviews M.D. Dunn’s You Get Bigger As You Go: Bruce Cockburn’s Influence and Evolution, as well as Steven Heighton and Ginger Pharand’s Songbook: The Lyrics and Music of Steven Heighton.
And much more!
What’s More…
Last week, CBC Ideas aired an interview with Tania Branigan, the author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution and winner of the 2023 Cundill History Prize. We recommend checking out her conversation with the talented Nahlah Ayed.